Recent Posts: Erik Svensen - Blog about Power BI, Power Apps, Power Query

If you find yourself clicking the same button in the Power BI Desktop you might find this little tip useful. When you right click a button in the ribbon – you can add it to the Quick Access Toolbar. This will add the button at the top (unless you have positioned it below the ribbon) […]

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to participate in the Microsoft Business Application Summit this year – but luckily we can watch all the session via https://community.powerbi.com/t5/MBAS-Gallery/bd-p/MBAS_Gallery But that would mean I had to leave Power BI Desktop in order to search and watch the videos – and the website also made it hard to see the […]

One of the things you should know when working with PowerQuery is that you can get a list of all functions in M by adding a blank query and use the #shared expression to get all the functions. This can be turned into a table by clicking the “Into Table” button on the ribbon and […]

After the Azure Analysis Services web designer was discontinued per march 1 2019 – link – there is no official tool to do a move of a PBIX datamodel to Azure Analysis Service. But by using a few different tools we do have ways of doing it anyway. Step 1 – DAX Studio Open your […]

One of my clients called me the other day and asked whether it was possible to export the selected order that was selected in the current report page – as she wanted to send the information to another user. I explained the export data feature from the visual action menu but she didn’t want to […]

If you are interested in learning how I scraped the web page for all the relevant data – check out these functions to extract data from pages using CSS query capabilities in the power query function Html.Table

After the Azure Analysis Services web designer was discontinued per march 1 2019 – link – there is no official tool to do a move of a PBIX datamodel to Azure Analysis Service. But by using a few different tools we do have ways of doing it anyway.

Step 1 – DAX Studio

Open your PBIX file in the Power BI Desktop and then open the DAX Studio (link to download) and connect DAX studio to the PBI model

In the status bar you will see the local port of the Analysis model running on your machine

Step 2 SQL Management Studio

Connect to Analysis Services using the server address from Step 1

This will give you a connection to the model

Now right click the Database and choose to script the Database to a new Query Editor window (or the clipboard)

Step 3 Connect to Azure Analysis Services

Use the SQL Server Management Studio to connect to Azure Analysis Services

Select to run a New XMLA Query on the server

And paste the query created in Step 2 in the new Query window – You can specify a model name in the highlighted area

Run the Query – and after a few seconds you should get this result – that the query has completed successfully.

And after a refresh of the server object you should see the newly scripted data model

Step 4 Finish the move

Now depending on the data sources in your model you need to setup the necessary connections and gateway.

One of my clients called me the other day and asked whether it was possible to export the selected order that was selected in the current report page – as she wanted to send the information to another user. I explained the export data feature from the visual action menu but she didn’t want to download a file and then locate that and then switch to Outlook and click new mail – type the correct the e-mail and attach the file – that was not very Power like – to much clicky clicky – because all the data was actually available when she had filtered the report for that particular record – the e-mail she wanted to mail the data to and off course the data she saw on the screen.

Hmm… Let’s see how we can use the PowerPlatform stack to solve this requirement.

A Power BI report to use a the demo

Based on the AdventureWorks database I build a report to select a Customer Key and filter it by a specific SalesOrderNumber

So, when the user has selected a sales order we should be able to send the information about the current sales order to either the customer or a alternate e-mail address.

PowerApps to works

Well we do have visual to integrate a PowerApp in our report and even though its in preview and there are some hickup’s we can make it work

But in order to insert it we do need to do this in a browser so let’s publish the report.

After I publish the report to the service, we can switch to edit mode and insert the PowerApp visual in the service.

This will introduce to a start screen with instructions on how to get started.

The important part is to include the fields from the datamodel you want to have access to in the PowerApp and this is done by adding the fields to the “PowerApps data” sink in the visuals pane.

As soon as you add the first field the PowerApp visual will change and let you select either to choose and app or create a new app

I added all these fields as I want to be able to access them in PowerApps

You have to use either Chrome or Edge browser to do this and keep calm – you will experience difficulties selecting the PowerApp visual with the mouse if you deselect it – try using the tab to rotate through the visual selection instead.

When all the fields is added we are ready to create a new app – well depending on the browser behaviour – so if it doesn’t work in Edge try in Chrome 🙂 – so click new app and a new tab with PowerApps will appear

Notice that a Gallery control is inserted and its linked to “‘PowerBIIntegration’.Data” – which is the filtered records in PowerBI –

If I modify the Gallery Title field to show SalesOrderNumber instead – you can see the magic

As is selected in PowerBI

Let’s modify the PowerApp

We don’t need the gallery control – so I delete this and insert a couple of other controls

So, I insert

Label to show sales order number

Text box to enter an email address

Check box to select whether to include a csv file

A mail icon for mail using office365

A mail icon for mail using flow and include the csv file

HTML text control to construct the mail body

One of the first thing I get trapped in is when showing the SalesOrderNumber in the label control.

The PowerBIntegration object is a table with records so you have to refer to a specific record/row to get the information from the field.

Therefore, use the FILTER function or in this case the FIRST function to get the value you need.

Power Query has a lot of built in functions, but it doesn’t have a function that exactly matches the VLOOKUP in Excel – but by using the M language and other M functions we can certainly replicate some of the VLOOKUP functionality and make an even more flexible lookup function.

Now the example data is like this

In Excel we would lookup the price for at specific productkey by using this formula

– in this case ProductKey 1 with a price of 100.

In order to replicate this in Power Query we can use the function List.PositionOf

So I add a new blank query

And then use the function List.PositionOf – with the following arguments

List – Is the column ProductKey from my lookuptable Products – refer to like this Products[ProductKey]

Value – Is the value to look in this case the value 1

Occurrence – Is set to 0 to only return one value

This will return the position of the value in the list – sort of like using the MATCH function in Excel

Now to return the price – we can use this result to lookup the price like this